The Golden Dream (20 page)

And yet, ironically, and unlike Westchester County, the Main Line was not “discovered” by the rich of Philadelphia. The rich, in fact, were virtually forced to settle there. The Main Line, among fashionable American suburbs, may be unique in that it was coerced
into fashionability. Also, for all Philadelphia's claims of continuity and age, the Main Line is a relatively new suburban area, barely a hundred years old. The area was conceived, designed, and developed in the 1870s and '80s by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a hard-nosed real estate venture. The railroad was not interested in aesthetics. It was interested in making money. When it began pushing its tracks westward along its “main line,” it was naturally eager to develop passenger and freight business along the way. To encourage this, the railroad built a chain of large and reasonably glossy resort hotels along the route, just as Henry Morrison Flagler was to do, a few years later, with his Florida East Coast Railroad, creating such places as Daytona Beach, Palm Beach, and Miami. The Pennsylvania Railroad then, in its advertising and promotion, declared that these hotels were fashionable. They weren't. Philadelphia is a city that is slow to change its ways. At the time, Philadelphia society, by tradition, lived in either Society Hill or Chestnut Hill, both well within the city limits. Philadelphia snubbed the Main Line, and stayed put, summering, as it always had, in Northeast Harbor, Maine. The resort hotel business seemed doomed to failure. Then the railroad decided to use a little muscle. Applying the kind of pressure that only a large corporation can, it urged its top executives to build expensive homes along the Main Line in order to give the area some cachet and chic. The railroad had become a great social force in Philadelphia, and many wealthy Philadelphia families—whose money came from other endeavors—held large blocks of railroad stock. The railroad applied pressure on its shareholders, too, until the message was clear: Build on the Main Line and help tone things up. And so, reluctantly, almost begrudgingly, the rich of Philadelphia began packing up and moving to the Main Line, which, at the time, seemed terribly far from the Philadelphia Club and the Cotillion.

It was not long, of course, before the Main Line towns, as in other suburban areas, arranged themselves in a well-defined pattern of social stratification, with some addresses better than others. Bryn Mawr, Villanova, and Haverford became the three most fashionable places, in that order. Gladwyne, however, can, according to one Philadelphia woman, “be either-or.” There is a great—some say the greatest—amount of wealth concentrated in Gladwyne. But Gladwyne, as some people point out, “is a little bit Jewish.” On the Main Line, Radnor is considered “very nice” (“Very nice is another way of saying filthy rich,” says one Main Line resident), and so is
Wynnewood, where the Walter H. Annenbergs have their large spread, which makes Wynnewood a little bit Jewish too. Bala-Cynwyd is to Philadelphia what Palo Alto is to San Francisco and what Stamford is to New York—sort of fashionable, but not really all that fashionable. Much of Bala-Cynwyd has become an extended shopping center. Poor Narberth, meanwhile, is at the bottom of the social pecking order. “Narberth just never
did
have any style,” says one woman. Penn Valley, on the other hand, is regarded as “a very nice young community,” but Penn Valley has a heavy cross to bear. It must use “Narberth” as a postal address. Wynnewood was dealt a similar blow by the Postal Service a while back when it was announced that mail could no longer be addressed to Wynnewood but had to be designated “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19151.” The town of Devon, many people feel, would not make a particularly good address if it were not for the famous Devon Horse Show which takes place there every year, and draws the fashionable from all over.

Wayne is a problem. It is considered “not a good social address,” but the people in Wayne would live nowhere else. Wayne people stress the “friendliness” of Wayne, and call it “the friendliest town on the Main Line.” To be sure, a great many Wayne families tend to see a lot of one another and tend not to mingle with non-Wayne folk. “It's a nice,
family
sort of place,” says another Wayne resident. And a movie exhibitor who operates a number of theaters in the area says: “It's very strange. A Walt Disney movie—and I mean a
terrible
Walt Disney movie—that laid an egg all over town will break box office records in Wayne.” Perhaps this is because the big, comfortable old houses in Wayne appeal to young couples with small children. Or perhaps it is because, as the rest of the Main Line says, “Wayne is just hopelessly square.”

“Old Maids Never Wed And Have Babies, Period,” is the phrase one is supposed to commit to memory in order to know the sequence of the stops on the Main Line's Paoli Local out of Thirtieth Street Station: Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr—with “Period” standing for Paoli, at the end of the line. Between Bryn Mawr and Paoli, the phrase is somewhat more outrageous: “Really Vicious Retrievers Snap Willingly, Snarl Dangerously. Beagles Don't,” for which the acrostic is Rosemont, Villanova, Radnor, St. Davids, Wayne, Strafford, Devon, Berwyn, Daylesford.
*
There is some justification for
the preponderance of Welsh, or Welsh-sounding, names on the Main Line: a small group of Welsh Quakers farmed the area before the Pennsylvania Railroad moved in. But most of the communities—Narberth, Radnor, Wynnewood, Bala-Cynwyd, Berwyn, and so on—were given their Welsh names rather spuriously by the railroad, which thought that this made the area sound quaint and Old World and therefore chic. Since then, private builders, developers, city planners, estate owners, restaurateurs, and shopkeepers have added to the Welshification process with names of their own devising—either lifted arbitrarily from the map of Wales or invented and made to
sound
Welsh—until today almost everything on the Main Line that does not appear to commemorate a member of the Continental Congress has a name that is Welsh-like.

But though the Main Line may have been created by artifice and public relations, it has now become extremely serious and solid. And for all its diversity and contradictions, there is a uniformity of feeling on the Main Line, a consistency of tone. Also, though some American suburbs have almost managed to insulate themselves completely from their parent cities—as, say, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, appears to have fully seceded from Detroit—the Main Line towns are always conscious that they are a part, and an important part, of that historic good gray entity that is the City of Brotherly Love and the Cradle of Liberty. There are attitudes and aspects of the Main Line that seem indigenous not only to it but to Philadelphia as well. “The most astonishing thing to me about the place,” says one woman, “is how many people move here from other parts of the country, and begin acting exactly like ‘old' Main Liners. They begin to dress Main Line and talk Main Line and think Main Line.” This, of course, is due to the towering influence of the Old Guard of Philadelphia society—the Ingersolls, the Biddies, the Robertses, the Morrises, the Wisters, and so on—upon the rest of the populace, and to the tremendous respect in which the Old Guard is held. One New York man whose Main Line friends are newcomers to the area said not long ago: “There's a funny Main Line practice, have you noticed? The minute you arrive, they pile you into their car and take you on a tour of the best neighborhoods, pointing out all the houses of all the rich people they don't know.” Old Guard Main Line society is, of course, quite aware that its style and behavior are being studied. This gives the Old Guard a sense of purpose, duty, and responsibility. It
must
set the tone and point the way.

“My God!” said one young woman the other day. “My daughter's started talking with that Main Line accent. She's picked it up
at school. She's even started using Main Line words, like ‘yummy' and ‘super.'” As for the accent, Mrs. Hugh Best of Wayne calls it “Philadelphia paralysis,” or “Main Line lockjaw,” pointing out that it is not unlike “Massachusetts malocclusion.” Mrs. Best, who was raised in Southern California, recalls that when she first moved to the Main Line, a native said to her: “My dear, you have the most beautiful speaking voice. I can understand every word you say!” And another parent swears that in her daughter's elocution class at the Shipley School the children were taught to speak correctly by clamping a pencil tightly between their jaws and then saying what they had to say.

Some observers have noticed a slight improvement in Main Line
couture
in recent years, and give the credit to such New York stores as Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor, which have opened Main Line branches. But the rule is still “Nothing flashy, nothing low-cut” when it comes to women's clothes, and the Main Line uniform still relies heavily on the conservative services of Nan Duskin and Peck & Peck, with perhaps, for the adventurous, a touch of New York's Bermuda Shop. For spring: print cotton blouse by McMullen, cotton skirt; for summer, print cotton blouse by McMullen with a gold circle pin on the collar; for fall, cardigan sweater, pearls, tweed skirt; for winter, good black suit, pearls, mink jacket, and perhaps a little hat for lunch at the Barclay.

“Most of us have gotten a little better,” says one woman, “but there are, I'll admit, a lot of women here who think it's all right to go to a dinner party dressed for golf.” As for men, the Philadelphia banking and law community have always set the style, which is Brooks Brothers' best. “In dress, we're very English here,” says one man. “A lot of men have their suits made in London and—well—you know how kind of funny English tailoring fits.” Philadelphia lawyers and bankers are also respectably a little out of press, and since they set the tone, other Philadelphia men follow their example. One man, who is particular about his clothes (and buys them in foreign places like New York and Beverly Hills) and is partial to Gucci loafers, admits that he is teased and kidded by his business associates for “trying to dress fancy, like a New Yorker.”

But even more distinctive than the Main Line speech and dress is the Main Line manner, which is often unsettlingly aloof and distant. Some attribute this to a certain shyness and a faint feeling that,
au fond
, Philadelphia is a somewhat second-rate city for which one must in the long run apologize. Others insist that it is just the
opposite: snobbishness, and an intractable sense of superiority. One out-of-town houseguest who was taken to a series of Main Line parties recently complained that, while the food was indeed good—and perhaps better than that in Boston—he was never introduced to anybody. “Well,” said his Philadelphia host, “the feeling here is that if you have to be introduced to people, you shouldn't have been invited—if you didn't know everybody already, you wouldn't have been there.”

“How very
calm
all these people seem,” said one young woman who was visiting the Main Line. Whether she intended this as praise, or whether she found Main Line calmness faintly off-putting, is hard to say, but since she was from New York, one suspects the latter. New Yorkers enjoy their rapid, competitive pace. A Philadelphian compares Philadelphia with New York this way: “In New York, everybody is so busy making money. In Philadelphia, we
have
made money.” Others point out that in New York men rarely get drunk at parties; they're too busy doing business. In Philadelphia, on the other hand, men get drunk at parties rather a lot. Some even say that there is a palpable difference between the way commuter trains leave Grand Central Station for Westchester County and the way the Paoli Local leaves for Bryn Mawr. The New York trains start off with a jolt and a seat-shaking rattle, followed by a lurch, while all the lights flash off and on. The Philadelphia trains, they say,
glide
out of the station.

A curious negativism also floats in the Main Line air. “Oh, I don't think so,” is apt to be the reaction to almost any suggestion. There is a tendency to run everything down a bit—other people, other cities, other parts of the Main Line itself. You may be invited to a club or restaurant where, you will be warned in advance, the food isn't very good—hardly edible, in fact. If you ask whether there isn't perhaps a better place, you will be told that yes, there is, but it is always so crowded that no one can ever get a table. You may be invited for a weekend on the Main Line but, your hostess will explain beforehand, you won't have a very good time; you'll probably be bored stiff; there's nothing to do. “It isn't like Beverly Hills, you know.” Main Liners spend a great deal of time emphasizing what the Main Line
isn't
. “It isn't like New York … it isn't like Chicago … it isn't like Washington … it isn't like Wilmington. Wilmington is nothing except Du Ponts.”

The Main Liner usually turns out to be against most things—most developments, that is, or anything new. He is against high-rise
apartments, against public housing, against day-care centers, against busing, against newcomers—so contagiously that even newcomers who have moved into high-rise apartments quickly become against other high-rises and other newcomers. The Main Liner is strongly Republican, but when he talks politics, he is more anti-Democrat than anything else. When he talks about what is wrong in Philadelphia, it is in terms of what is even more wrong with New York.

But an even more pronounced characteristic of the Main Liner is his imperturbability. His composure is complete and nothing astonishes him or ruffles him. The Main Liner is proudest of his poise—of how, even in the most awkward moments, he can rise to the occasion grandly and with perfect aplomb. There are, for instance, an unusual number of Main Line stories—most of them surely apocryphal—of how well-placed Main Line ladies have dealt with underpants crises. If all the stories are true, something like Legionnaires' Disease must have affected the elastic in local panties, because panties seem to have descended with alarming frequency here, and always in important places: while standing in a receiving line at the Assembly, while walking down the aisle of Old St. David's Church (Episcopal) in Radnor, or while leaving the restaurant at the Barclay. One story has the lady in question merely stooping to collect the fallen garment and putting it quietly in her purse while continuing to shake hands. Another has the debutante picking up the panties and handing them to her escort without comment. Another has her merely stepping out of the collapsed lingerie and signaling to a waiter to carry it away. All these underpants stories are recited with a chuckle but also with respect for the lady in question's cool self-possession in a situation which would have reduced lesser mortals to crimson-faced embarrassment.